Let X = Any College Design AI + Design Thinking = India's Wake-Up Call

Let X = Any College

Design AI + Design Thinking = India's Wake-Up Call

Let X = any college in India.

What’s happening in X?

A new term gets coined in America—say, AI for Healthcare. Within weeks, X has a new "Centre of Excellence" for it. Professors suddenly change their designations—Dr. So-and-So is now an AI Healthcare Expert. A seminar is hosted. A few photos are uploaded. Maybe a tie-up with a startup whose website has more buzzwords than results. And boom—X is now a pioneer.

But pioneer of what?

Not of solutions. Not of outcomes. Not of breakthroughs.

X is a pioneer in branding.

X doesn’t want to fix farmer distress, broken healthcare systems, tribal education, or dying rivers. No. It wants to show how many students got placed in MNCs. How many got 60 LPA in some H-1B-fueled outsourced job. Because that’s what sells. That’s what attracts the next batch of students. That’s what earns applause at education summits attended by bureaucrats and politicians.

And why not? After all, the college principal knows the Chief Minister. Or the Chairman plays golf with the CM’s wife. The elite endorsements are in place.

So where is the design? Where is the intelligence? Where is the thinking?

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Design Thinking: A Tool for Change, Not Decoration

Design Thinking was never meant to be a trend. It was meant to challenge the norm. It was supposed to say:

• Let’s listen before we design.

• Let’s empathize before we prescribe.

• Let’s solve before we sell.

Instead, it has been reduced to a workshop for faculty orientation, with slides copied from Stanford's d.school, but no connection to the anganwadi worker down the street or the panchayat struggling with water scarcity.

Design Thinking is being taught, but no one is thinking about how to design systems that serve our people.

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Design AI: Beyond Models, Towards Missions

Now take AI. A tool so powerful it can redesign every process from agriculture to justice.

But in X, Design AI becomes just a lab with a TensorFlow logo, a paper published in an Elsevier journal, and a chatbot demo.

What if Design AI was not about tools, but missions?

• Predicting dropout rates in rural schools using local language data.

• Designing AI for real-time flood warnings in coastal villages.

• Automating legal aid advice for the undertrial prisoners who don’t even know their rights.

Design AI is not Artificial Intelligence slapped onto a Canva poster. It is Applied Insight. It is Algorithmic Empathy.

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The Normal Has Become Abnormal

And here’s the deeper issue.

We have normalized a sick system.

A system where:

• Colleges chase trends instead of truth.

• Departments rebrand instead of reinvent.

• Success is measured by CTC, not societal transformation.

This is abnormal. But it’s become the new normal.

So the time has come—for Designers of a New India.

Designers who think. Thinkers who design. Not to impress the West, but to serve the rest.

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The Real Revolution

If we want India to move from "developing" to "evolving," our institutions must stop acting like placement factories.

They must become problem-solving ecosystems.

They must stop asking “Which trend can we adopt?” and start asking “Which wound can we heal?”

This is not just an article. This is a call to every educator, policymaker, student, and citizen.

Let’s build institutions that:

• Solve problems,

• Empower minds,

• Invent futures,

• And most of all—design hope.